Digital production color printers, such as the Xerox Corp. DocuColor™ 5000 and 8000 Digital Presses, may show excessive gloss levels in color prints particularly when images with dark shadow colors are printed.
Advanced destination profiles typically provided in the printer contain a Gray Component Replacement (GCR) module which sets the amount of process color separations (e.g., CMYK) to be used appropriately. GCR adds black process color separations. Particularly for dark colors, adjusting or modifying GCR is one way to reduce the gloss level. This process, however, can be difficult and complex since modifying GCR may induce contours depending on the way GCRs are designed. Since GCR is important to high quality color reproduction using toners or inks, many print vendors fine tune the addition of black intelligently either by using complex algorithms or by carefully designed experiments. Experiments are often done with many iterations. Once tuning is completed, the GCR becomes part of the profile look-up table (LUT). Often for International Color Consortium (ICC) workflow, it is saved as the ICC profile.
Another way for reducing gloss levels is by introducing low gloss toners and improvement to the fusing subsystems. This approach is extremely complex and may also be very expensive.
As such, customer expectations for gloss have not always been completely fulfilled.